


They Play This Game Sometimes...

by SpecialTrampAgentOtters (Elsie1285)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: FTF-TXFrevival, Gap Filler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-23
Updated: 2016-02-23
Packaged: 2018-05-22 17:52:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6089047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsie1285/pseuds/SpecialTrampAgentOtters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder's musings on the end of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Play This Game Sometimes...

**Author's Note:**

> TITLE: They Play This Game Sometimes...  
> AUTHOR: elsie1285  
> DISTRIBUTION: Anywhere, just let me know and keep my name attached.  
> SUMMARY: A little bit of gap-fill Scully introspection over the years.  
> PAIRING: MSR  
> RATING: R  
> SPOILERS: Minor references to FTF, The Truth, IWTB and pre-revival news  
> TIMELINE: Gap-fill: FTF - Pre-Season 10  
> DISCLAIMER: Not mine, CC's, yadda yadda yadda.  
> FEEDBACK: Feed a starving Phile, tuppence a bag...

They play this game sometimes.

The rules are simple: no two answers can be the same, nor be variations on a theme. Early on, she makes the directive that answers cannot involve dead people. Her voice wavers, avoiding the acknowledgement of salt-flayed wounds and the resulting necessary self-preservation, instead asserting that it would be “morbid” and outside of the realms of scientific possibility. He elects not to point out, in fact, his own brush with “death” has pushed it pretty far into the realms of their own personal possibility, for the sake of the twenty minutes of levity the game brings them. 

Neither speaks of the obvious, a living ghost buried deep in Wyoming, blissfully unaware of their existence, vanishing into the Elysian Fields of their memories, having branded her with every faded stretch mark, each tiny, phantom, paint-tacky paw print, maddeningly out of reach when she wakes.

It started with an especially arduous day of driving, June 1999. It was dry, a suffocating heat pulsating across miles and miles of sweltering scrub land, returning from a faceless, bland case. As incongruous as the new patch of grass under the shiny playground discovered in Northern Texas a year before had been, it would have been a welcome break from the sprawling monotony facing him then, hammering across Route 75, what seemed a lifetime later. Neither mentioned Dallas, jiffy-pop poppers or freight trains, but he could almost hear drone memories fizzing in her recollections. The need to peel away from the invariable caliginous nature of their day-to-day existence caught his breath and his mind scrabbled for distraction, an activity, challenge. Really anything to divert from reminiscing on how close he’d come to losing her.

“It’s the last day on earth - whatcha gonna do, G-Woman?”

She turned from the window and he fancied he saw the worker-bees spiral away from her thoughts, momentarily forgotten in the game. She cocked her head, her tell, engaged.

“You mean after I march into the Kersh’s office with a huge ol’ can of ‘I-told-you-fucking-so’?”

“Yeah, after that. Although you could sell ringside seats for that show - make a killing.”

“If there’s anything to spend it on by then.” She whipped an errant lock of cinnamon hair from her face and scrutinized her hands, mouth twisting as she contemplated her options. He waited her out, the seed on which he sucked producing a faint hissing sound. “I’d paint my nails.” 

He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that. 

“Bright; some variation on one of the peacock shades; something I’d never wear in the Bureau.” He chuckled and she side-eyed him, assessing him. “Your go.”

And so it started. And continued: on road trips; over Chinese; across desks on slow, hazy Washington days, hiding in plain sight in the office; during stakeouts, before she invariably fell asleep and he was left to his own devices; and, after their tumbled, carnal actions the night his mother died, on quiet nights of union, jammed together, crowbar-tight, in her sleigh bed or on the slick leather of his couch, sticky with the remnants of their yearning. Their voices were sluggish, rolled with the cotton wool of fatigue, but still they played.

After they become transients, drifting across states, the game takes a more desperate edge. No longer a quaint flight of fantasy to while away the hours, it now has a date, a timescale, contorting it into a boiling, burning bucket-list of their own brand of desire: what could be if they ever returned to civilization before the coming apocalypse. 

Of course they know it will never happen this way: neither one of them will sit still on the date of Colonization, drinking each other in and memorizing each other’s countenances. The apocalypse will announce its coming with a whisper, he is sure of it. The natural order of the universe with be up-ended: snow in June; tsunamis half a world away from fault lines, Governments dissolved in mere hours with no repercussions. Each will grow and build on the last until the alien invasion is inescapable. He remembers Skyland Mountain and a madman pleading with the stars, ranting about implants and alien-communications. He panics that this will happen to her; she will be nothing but a conduit for the coming take-over, while he runs around: Chicken Little, shouting that the sky is falling down. He will be the stuff of a million fairytale metaphors, crying wolf and leaving breadcrumbs but ultimately losing the path home, no fairy godmother to rescue them all until it is too late. 

He knows they will spend their last day racing to find him, a lanky teenager with a smattering of freckles and eyes of liquid honey. Not to save him; it will be futile. He knows, instead, that he needs to take her to him, to end it there, together. Their son will not know who they are when they die, of that he is certain, but he will know they exist, that he is loved without condition, by two sets of remarkable people. Until then, though, they will continue to play at pretend.

Sometimes he fancies their pastime is the only thing keeping him semi-sane, holed up in a beige, clapboard house in Butt-Fuck, Virginia, rented under pseudonyms. He can feel the murk pulling him in again, conspiracy ripples lapping at his ankles and eddying around his knees and he’s dimly aware of sad eyes, watchful, contemplating his escalating descent into hades. Their robin’s-egg hue becomes his anchor, his rock in the middle of a nameless lake in Georgia, and he knows he needs to hollow his way out before it’s too late.

He starts on a Wednesday: a faceless day, wintery sun wavering just behind the barn at the back of the property and the smell of shampoo and cardamom swirling in the bedroom long after she’s left to run errands in the nearby town: paying their bills in cash; purchasing new burner sims; posting a coded letter or two. Run-of-the-mill on-the-lam behavior. Despite his solitude, he finds himself creeping around their homestead, quieter than an alien-bounty hunter with its mouth sewn shut; probably more secretive too.

He senses her return, picturing her jangling the substantial chain on the gate, securing their fortress from the inside, discouraging not only the neighbors or the postmen but Government agents, syndicate members and clones. From behind buttercup curtains he charts her progress she snakes her way up the driveway, and moves silently to the back of the house, concealed as he observes her bustling up the porch with grocery bags, dragging a bag of compost for their burgeoning vegetable patch. Entering the front room, she stops dead. On the table lies a faded, battered Scrabble set. It is set up, ivory tiles spilling from the bag and the racks facing each other. In the center of the board lies a self-assured post-it note, garish neon discordant with the muted hues of the board, on which he has scrawled:

On December 21st, 2012:  
“I’d play scrabble with you.”

He watches as she drinks in her own words, from a sleepy conversation 6 years ago, in a shared motel room somewhere in Iowa, parroted back at her. She takes in the room around her: lights dimmed; a dusty bottle of wine breathing to the left of the board; the door to his lair closed, records of conspiracies and other-worldly experiences bolted away for the evening; and observes the tension evaporate from her wiry shoulders. She runs a hand through her ash-blonde bob, shorter now than when they had first fled the Anasazi ruins, and he feels a rush of nostalgia for her titian hair, twisting around his fingers in a motel room in Roswell and prompting muffled sneezes in him as they curled around each other to sleep. 

“Where are you?” she breathes and he emerges, sporting an apologetic, lopsided smile, holding his palms in supplication. He winds his arms around her waist, impossibly tiny, and she lifts her lips to his in greeting, or in thanks. He doesn’t care which.

And so it continues, each surprising the other. They often let months pass without another action crossed from the list until he starts to prowl around the property, avoiding the towering fence to the main road but pacing the length of the drive, caged-animal aggression playing across his features. This is her trigger: she purchases sesame bagels, smothered in cream-cheese and eaten in bed, inside the protection of a blanket fort, hiding from the onslaught of the Virginia winter; they lie in a nest of blankets on the floor of the lounge, working their way through pirate seasons of ‘The West Wing’, arguing over favourite characters, naked and chilly as the fire cools and their ardor burns; they take turns in reading to each other, sprawled on the porch and feet entwined in the Indian Summer sun: her request is Wilde; his, Harper Lee. 

When their enforced isolation becomes too much for her, emotions akin to grief for her lost family swelling in her throat and threatening to spill out in expletives, he holds her as they watch ‘Brief Encounter’, sentimentality giving way to sensuality, his chestnut head between her legs, less-than manicured nails entwined in his coffee pelt as he helps her forget, just for tonight. He draws long, languorous baths to the notes of Janis Ian and envelopes her in long limbs, soapy kisses and sliding, rhythmic love until she cries out for him, spilling water to the corners of their tiny bathroom. 

In 2005 he tells himself he doesn’t resent it when she finally receives their old boss’ call, inviting her back to the world of the living, back into a normative life. In the midst of residencies and 36 hour shifts in which he sees nothing of her, he tells himself that they’ve tired of their game, together; not that she doesn’t need it anymore, doesn’t need him anymore. Even when she rents an apartment close to the hospital, in order to be closer during those hellish shifts, he wants to believe the lie. 

It isn’t until his own resurrection, an icy immersion back into the un-yielding universe of the FBI, that he realizes her sacrifice in bringing him out of hiding and back to chasing monsters. The world she has carefully crafted for herself suddenly seems tremulous and fragile, threatened by the possibility of his official return to his life’s work. Should he be left to pursue the ever-inaccessible truth alone? Could he be? 

It takes almost everything he has to walk away again, to return to their crumbling home, for her. He instead builds an online presence, consulting on unexplained phenomena and even making a foray into publishing: old case-files rewritten, names erased. In return, her city apartment sits unused; she gravitates to their home even when she is swaying with exhaustion. More than once he has met her at the gate, her eyes glassy with fatigue, and has guided the car along the driveway for her. By the time he has parked up and battened down the hatches against their faceless foes, she is facedown and naked in their bed, a shock of russet luminous against their indigo pillows, snoring softly. As he eases himself into bed and curls around her in an interrogative, she moves against him, sighing, and he tangles himself in her, breathing her in.

And they still play their game. It is lacking in lustre, tarnished by their mutual preoccupations, but they try. She tiptoes through the crypt at Washington National Cathedral with him and holds his hand as they gaze up at Darth Vader in his gargoyle glory, laughing at the wheezing sounds her partner makes beside her. Neither of them mentions his own parallels to Vader and Luke, choosing to ignore his tobacco-riddled biological father, left to be blown to pieces in a cave in New Mexico. 

He takes her to Seattle on one of her infrequent weekends off from Our Lady of Sorrows. Despite his vehement hatred of water-faring vessels, he takes her on a ferryboat, the insistent fingers of the wind whipping peach hair around their faces and tying it in knots as they take shelter in each other, goose-pimpled and eskimo-nosed. He forgets to be seasick, cocooned as he is against her.

On his 51st birthday, she drives him to Parrott’s Woods, parking the car facing down to the park. He doesn’t question her unconventional choice of location: a cemetery seems as fitting place as any to celebrate. Unconventional would be a trivialization for them at this point. She produces a flask, pouring them a toxic Bloody Mary each to help them warm up in the frigid October air. They languish on the hood of her SUV, Dire Straits whispering from the stereo and their bodies wrapped in furred-coats and a cashmere blanket. He feels her drift in his arms, limbs supple and bright head heavy, and shifts to breathe her in. For once, time has stopped and the inevitable race towards this year’s mid-winter’s night escapes him. If this is how the world ends, he thinks to himself, his thoughts unfinished before joining her in slumber. They wake, hours later, chilled and stiff, the buzz from the vodka dissipated and replaced by ravenous hunger and a desire for destructive, heady sex. Looking back on that evening, he doesn’t remember the journey home, or stopping for hastily-grabbed falafel, but he cannot forget the taste of tzatziki in her mouth, nor ignore the scrape of her fingernails along his back as he pushes her up against the surfaces of their kitchen, keening her name to the heavens.

She doesn’t seem surprised when December 21st passes uneventfully: Skeptic Squirrel alive and well; for him it is a crushing blow, winding him. He catalogues every risk taken, every price paid, in pursuit of his precious “Truth”, eventually anti-climatic. They have lost everything but each other in an attempt to understand and fight the coming apocalypse. All for naught. They are cut off from society; have cheated death so many times it seems they must have a tab the size of the mid-west; have given up their most precious creation: their son. For what? A nothing-armageddon; another ruse from their enemy, designed to pied-piper him into his own madness. It is predictably successful.

So all-consumed by regret is he that he is unaware of her observations, watching him sink deeper down, further away without hope of saviour. He does not register the appearance of fine worry lines around her mouth; nor the months and years slipping away in silence. Nothing penetrates his encompassing gloom; for him, the game is over – there is no end of the world for which to prepare and nothing for which to battle.

Until one day she stands on the threshold, chin tilted in defiance, eyes flashing from cyan to slate. The date for colonization came and went 2 years ago and he is still quicksand-deep, surrounded by newspaper clippings, and google-searches, coming up empty-handed. The click of the latch from their weather-warped door is what it takes for him to notice her again, to lift himself from the mire of swirling ink into which he has immersed himself. There’s one small duffel on the floor and the most recent of a long line of overnight bags in her hand, her possessions still scarce, despite her return to civilization six years ago.

She’s gone. He cannot say she’s leaving. That would be singing in the wrong tense; She’s already checked out and this final turn to survey their mutual surroundings is her last physical act in their house. He wishes his fuddled brain knew why. He only knows it’s him. He has to ask one more thing: 

“If it was the last day on earth, what would you do?” He's hollow, broken, and he knows he’s clutching. Not at straws but at anything: an arm; her hair; his sanity. She softens. Suddenly she is freckles and strawberry; cacao and patchouli; brimstone and summer rain and she’s her, his, again.

“I’d be here.” 

He doesn’t think he hears her properly, the hope flaring in his throat, mingling with bile and the aftertaste of what might be whiskey from last night’s quiet unraveling in his musty office. 

Before he can speak, however, she whispers; “But the world didn't end. It hasn’t. I can’t be here anymore…” She drops a set of keys to the table by the door, the keys to her apartment in town. It is not an invitation, he understands, but her last reach across the gulf that has stretched between them since 2012: I am here but I cannot be here. 

And then she’s gone, apricot hair swirling in his fingertips, just out of reach. The porch door slams and he knows she’s wrong. 

The world has ended and the game is over.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to my wonderful Beta and best-friend, LC Wales. I'm a lucky lucky Phile.


End file.
